ice President Calvin Coolidge became president in 1923 after Warren G. Harding died of a heart attack. After Harding's death, the public learned that members of the Harding administration had accepted bribes and loans from oil men who sought to lease oil reserves on naval property. The resulting scandal damaged Harding's reputation. Calvin Coolidge's honesty and integrity helped him distance himself from the corruption of Harding's administration. Coolidge's popularity was so great that he won the 1924 Republican nomination on the convention's first ballot. Republicans eagerly aligned themselves behind Coolidge's low-tax, high-tariff policies and his impeccable personal reputation.

In contrast to the unified Republicans, the Democratic party was split into two opposing groups. This factionalism reflected the profound social and economic changes that wracked the United States after World War I. Both native-born Americans and foreign immigrants poured into northern and mid-western cities during the 1920s, making the U.S. a predominantly urban society for the first time in the nation's history. Many of these urban dwellers worked on the newly created assembly lines in mass-production industries. Here they built the automobiles, washing machines, and refrigerators that American consumers eagerly purchased. These industrial workers often supported the Democratic party, which was increasingly becoming the voice of the northern urban ethnic (often Catholic or Jewish) working class. However, other Democrats staunchly opposed immigration and urbanization. This Democratic faction, centered in the South and the West, remained loyal to the Democratic party because they were bitterly hostile to the "party of Lincoln." These Democrats supported immigration restrictions and Prohibition and rallied around Christian fundamentalism and nativism.

These divisions within the Democratic party made the 1924 Democratic convention the longest on record, as the two factions were unable to agree upon a candidate or a platform. New York governor Alfred Smith was the man of choice for the urban northern bloc while former Treasury secretary William McAdoo of California appealed to the strong rural southern contingent. Repudiation of the Ku Klux Klan was one of the major issues that divided the convention. The southern contingent, whose rural leaders included many Klan sympathizers, rejected a rebuke in the party platform of the Klan's anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish and anti-black activities. It took seventeen days and one hundred ballots before the party bosses lifted their instructions to delegates. John W. Davis, a West Virginia lawyer with Wall Street connections, became the compromise presidential nominee and Charles Bryan of Nebraska, the younger brother of three-time candidate William Jennings Bryan, was selected as his running mate.

During the campaign, Davis's pro-business outlook made it difficult for voters to distinguish his views from those of Coolidge. As a result, many northern laborers and western farmers supported the Progressive party candidate, Sen. Robert La Follette of Wisconsin.

In the end, Coolidge's platform of tax cuts and tariffs attracted fifty-four percent of the popular vote and seventy-two percent of the electoral college. Republicans thus retained control of the White House, which they held from 1921 to 1933.